Sumner being about to return
into your neighborhood, I gladly accept his offer to take a
message to you. I wish I had anything beyond a dull Letter to
send! But unless, as my Wife suggests, I go and get you a
D'Orsay _Portrait_ of myself, I see not what there is! Do you
read German or not? I now and then fall in with a curious German
volume, not perhaps so easily accessible in the Western world.
Tell me. Or do you ever mean to learn it? I decidedly wish you
would.--As to the D'Orsay Portrait, it is a real curiosity:
Count D'Orsay the emperor of European Dandies portraying the
Prophet of spiritual Sansculottism! He came rolling down hither
one day, many months ago, in his sun-chariot, to the bedazzlement
of all bystanders; found me in dusty gray-plaid dressing-gown,
grim as the spirit of Presbyterianism (my Wife said), and
contrived to get along well enough with me. I found him a man
worth talking to, once and away; a man of decided natural gifts;
every utterance of his containing in it a wild caricature
_likeness_ of some object or other; a dashing man, who might,
some twenty years sooner born, have become one of Bonaparte's
Marshals, and _is,_ alas,--Count D'Orsay! The Portrait he dashed
off in some twenty minutes (I was dining there, to meet Landor);
we have not chanced to meet together since, and I refuse to
undergo any more eight-o'clock dinners for such an object.--Now
if I do not send you the Portrait, after all?

Fraser's account of the _Miscellanies_ stood legibly extended
over large spaces of paper, and was in several senses amazing to
look upon. I trouble _you_ only with the result. Two Hundred
and forty-eight copies (for there were some one or two
"imperfect"): all these he had sold, at two guineas each; and
sold swiftly, for I recollect in December, or perhaps November,
he told me he was "holding back," not to run entirely out. Well,
of the L500 and odd so realized for these Books, the portion that
belonged to me was L239,--the L261 had been the expense of
handing the ware to Emerson over the counter, and drawing in
the coin for it! "Rules of the Trade";--it is a Trade, one would
surmise, in which the Devil has a large interest. However,--not
to spend an instant polluting one's eyesight with that side of
it,--let me feel joyfully, with thanks to Heaven and America,
that I do receive such a sum in the shape of wages, by decidedly
the noblest method in which wages could come to a man.